English for everyone

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Even though they were born in Europe, hot dogs have become as American as apple pie.
But why on earth are they called hot dogs?
In one version, hot dogs were originally called “dachshund sausages” because they looked like a long thin German dog, a “dachshund”. A newspaper cartoonist drew a picture of barking dachshunds between buns and labelled them “hot dogs” because he couldn’t spell “dachshund”. The trouble is, no one has ever found that cartoon, so we don’t know if it really happened!
Whatever they were called, they had become part of American culture by the 1920s. People ate them at baseball games, horse races, country fairs and circuses. Today, America is hot dog headquarters, but not everyone can agree on the perfect way to eat one!
New Yorkers like it with onions and sauerkraut, but folks from Chicago prefer it with tomatoes, pickles and peppers.More »

One sunny morning in 1923, Arthur Ferguson was walking across Trafalgar Square in London when he saw a richly dressed young man — obviously an American — standing in front of Nelson’s Column. The American was gazing up in reverent admiration at the monument to England’s greatest admiral.
Just for a laugh, Arthur went up to the young man and introduced himself. Could he be of service? He was, after all, caretaker of this ancient monument. Yes, the statue on the top was indeed that of Lord Nelson, England’s greatest hero. Such a shame that it would have to go. Trafalgar Square would never be the same without it. But the British economy was extremely weak, and the country had to have the money. The column, statue, lions and fountains, all had to be sold.More »

Will we live to first cloned human?
There are a lot of films and science fiction books about reproducing exact copies of people. Today, science fiction has become science fact.
A clone is an exact copy of another living thing. Cloning is a controversial issue. Some people are ready to eat cloned fruits and vegetables, but many people express negative attitudes about cloning animals. The question of human cloning is even more controversial.More »

How much food have we eaten for our life?
The average Frenchwoman will eat many different things by the time she is seventy nine, for example:
25 cows
40 sheep
35 pigs
1.200 chickens
2.07 tonnes of fish
5.05 tonnes of potatoes
30 000 litres of milk
13 000 eggs
50 000 loaves of bread
12 000 bottles of wine
9,000 litres of orange juiceMore »

No one can avoid stress, especially nowadays. But we can reduce its effects. Here are some simple rules how to manage stress.

Live in the present!
• Live in the present — don’t waste time worrying about how much better things were in the past or what might happen in the future. Most people have perfected the art of living in the now.

Love yourself!
• Relax your demands on yourself a bit, most of us expect too much.
• Always be kind with yourself. Be a friend to yourself.
• Discuss your problems with a friend, relative, or some other person. Don’t keep them to yourself.
• Stop whatever you are doing, put your feet up and read your favorite book or watch your favorite TV show. You deserve it!More »

Who is the tallest man in the world? Who is the fattest woman in the world? How heavy is the heaviest man? Who has the longest moustache? How long can a person talk without stopping? What distance can a man cover if he walks on his hands? Which is the most visited Web site?
All these facts can be found in the Guinness Book of World Records. It has information about the world’s tallest, shortest, loudest, heaviest, richest, rarest and greatest. It demonstrates people’s achievements in nearly every field: from sports to politics, from entertainment to science, from the business world to pastimes.
It is also a wonderful portrait of human eccentricity, showing the great lengths to which some people will go to become record breakers.More »

This poem is composed by taking one line from the works of 38 different English poets. How many can you identify?

THE POEM OF POEMS
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
Life’s a short summer-man a flower
By turn we catch the vital breath and die,
The cradle and the tomb, alas! So nigh.
To be is better far than not to be,
All man’s life me seems a tragedy,
For light cares speak when mighty griefs are dumb
The bottom is but shallow whence they comeMore »

Have you seen Kevin Costner in the film The Bodyguard? His character in the film, Frank Farmer, is a professional bodyguard who got his training in the Secret Service. Before he hired himself to protect Rachel Marron (Whitney Huston) he had worked for President Reagan. He still blames himself for the fact that Ronald Reagan got shot.
Altogether, four American presidents have been assassinated and attempts have been made on the lives of others. The first president to be killed was Abraham Lincoln. He was shot while attending the theatre in Washington. James Garfield was shot a few months after his inauguration and died at the age of forty-nine. William McKinley was killed in Buffalo, New York in 1901. John Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas in 1963.More »

One wise man said that no man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. True, isn’t it? However, we sometimes realise, to our great astonishment, that the knowledge of the language is not enough. Every country has its customs. Different nations can behave differently in the same situations. Let’s be polite travellers. Let’s respect the customs of the country we are in. Let’s not forget the proverb: “When in Rome do as the Romans do.»More »

(What experts think about it)THE LANGUAGE
(By G. Mikes)
When I arrived in England I thought I knew English. After I’d been here an hour I realised that I did not understand one word. In the first week I picked up a tolerable working knowledge of the language and the next seven years convinced me gradually but thoroughly that I would never know it really well, let alone perfectly. This is sad. My only consolation being that nobody speaks English perfectly.
Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.More »